Weave Adds Groups And Events To Its ‘Tinder For Networking’ App

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Professional networking app Weave wants to help professionals find others that they’d like to meet with, through a double opt-in selection process. Now it’s making it easier for users going to events or part of professional organizations to find one another with a new feature being added to the app.

Weave takes the Tinder model of swiping left or right to indicate which people you’d like to meet with and applies it to professional networking. Like Tinder, it takes into account a user’s location to ensure that people who get matched up are actually able to have coffee or otherwise meet with one another.

You just download the app, link it to their LinkedIn account, and it will use the data there to generate a profile page. After that’s done, you can go to town swiping left and right and then message the folks you have mutual interest in meeting. It’s a pretty useful little tool that I’ve used to meet up with a few investors and founders that I wouldn’t have otherwise come across. Fun!

According to Weave co-founder Brian Ma, the app is generating more than 1,000 matches each week, mostly in early tech hubs. To date, it’s mostly being used for job hunting and hiring, but also for things like co-founder dating, fundraising, and business development.

The only restriction is that you’re tied to people in your relative proximity. So for stuff like events, it’s only soooo useful due to the limited amount of time that people spend around each other. It’s even less useful for professional organizations, since members could be based in various different cities but only cross paths every now and then.

With the latest update to Weave, the app hopes to solve some of those issues. Now Weave will enable users attending events or part of alumni networks or other organizations to surface others who share those common connections. That will allow attendees to connect prior to an event happening and meet on-site. It will also allow people in similar organizations to connect even if they are not in the same city, but make plans to meet up when they are.

But people can’t just opt in to any network or event… Instead, they have to enter in a private invite code to get added and interact with others in that group. The app also added specific groups to organize and highlight members on the app.

Weave was founded by Decide.com founder Brian Ma and early Buzzlabs employee Elpizo Choi, and is in the current Y Combinator batch. The app was self-funded but, along with everyone else at YC Demo day in a few weeks, it will probably be looking for funding soon.